How to Stop Employee Burnout with Hospital Scheduling Software

It’s easy for hospital and healthcare staff to feel overworked. Physicians, nurses, and support workers juggle many pressure-packed tasks, including patient care, compliance issues, and other critical assignments. Managing those competing priorities can burn out employees—and cost medical practices time, money and knowledge, as a result.

One of the best ways to mitigate employee stress is staffing and scheduling your team properly. Of course, simply creating a fair work schedule can be a huge headache by itself! But that doesn’t have to be the case. By using hospital scheduling software, you can decrease your risk of employee burnout and turnover. Here’s how:

Schedule Strategically

One reason why many employees feel overworked is that, well, they are. It’s not uncommon for physicians to work weeks in a row without a break and not receive the vacation or holiday time they request. That grueling workload can exhaust employees emotionally. When that happens, they may not have much compassion left for their patients—which hurts hospitals and practices overall.

The right scheduling software helps you balance everyone’s needs strategically. You can see that time-off requests are distributed fairly and point to data showing as much if complaints arise. You can also use real-time patient flow information to avoid over- or understaffing. By right-sizing these schedules, you will keep your staff in manageable and less stressful situations.

Make Time for More Important Tasks

Every practice or hospital needs a staffing schedule, which means every practice or hospital needs someone to make that schedule. If that person is not already using scheduling software, they’re likely managing this complex process with an EMR module, Excel file, or on paper by hand. No matter the method, that’s a lot of work that takes time from potentially more important tasks.

Consider this: It used to take the University of Rochester Pathology Department an entire week to create a three-month schedule. By switching from their manual process to an automated scheduling system, they shrunk that timeframe to less than a day. Over the course of a year, that’s a savings of almost a month’s worth of administrative work. Imagine how much more work your staff could complete—and how much happier they’d be—with that extra time.

Eliminate Bottlenecks and Frustration

To learn more about the state of physician scheduling, Bio-Optronics surveyed physicians from more than 150 organizations. They shared that Excel- and paper-based scheduling solutions had the most bottlenecks, and approximately 74% of respondents were dissatisfied with these systems. Conversely, third-party, scheduling software solutions had the highest satisfaction rate.

The line from dissatisfaction to burnout is clear. But scheduling-related frustrations run deeper than administrative bottlenecks. They can also mean staffers struggling to find appropriate specialists and dealing with the patients left waiting. Automated scheduling software offers better scheduling accuracy thanks to pre-coded rules and constraints. This can prevent such organizational issues and the employee fatigue they cause.